Diet and Nutrition: The Fundamental Principle

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Diet and Nutrition: The Fundamental Principle

If you are a true believer in any of the
above food religions, I expect that you will find my views unsettling.
But what I consider "good diet" results from my clinical
work with thousands of cases. It is what has worked with those
cases. My eclectic views incorporate bits and pieces of all the
above. In my own case, I started out by following the Organic
school, and I was once a raw food vegetarian who ate nothing but
raw food for six years. I also ate Macrobiotic for about one year
until I became violently allergic to rice.

I have arrived at a point where I understand
that each person's biochemistry is unique and each must work out
their own diet to suit their life goals, life style, genetic predisposition
and current state of health. There is no single, one, all-encompassing,
correct diet. But, there is a single, basic, underlying Principle
of Nutrition that is universally true. In its most simplified
form, the basic equation of human health goes: Health = Nutrition
/ Calories. The equation falls far short of explaining the origin
of each individuals diseases or how to cure diseases but Health
= Nutrition / Calories does show the general path toward healthful
eating and proper medicine.

All animals have the exact same dietary
problem: finding enough nutrition to build and maintain their
bodies within the limits of their digestive capacity. Rarely in
nature (except for predatory carnivores) is there any significant
restriction on the number of calories or serious limitation of
the amount of low-nutrition foods available to eat. There's rarely
any shortage of natural junk food on Earth. Except for domesticated
house pets, animals are sensible enough to prefer the most nutritional
fare available and tend to shun empty calories unless they are
starving.

But humans are perverse, not sensible.
Deciding on the basis of artificially-created flavors, preferring
incipid textures, we seem to prefer junk food and become slaves
to our food addictions. For example, in tropical countries there
is a widely grown root crop, called in various places: tapioca,
tavioca, manioc, or yuca. This interesting plant produces the
greatest tonnage of edible, digestible, pleasant-tasting calories
per acre compared to any other food crop I know. Manioc might
seem the answer to human starvation because it will grow abundantly
on tropical soils so infertile and/or so droughty that no other
food crop will succeed there. Manioc will do this because it needs
virtually nothing from the soil to construct itself with. And
consequently, manioc puts next to nothing nourishing into its
edible parts. The bland-tasting root is virtually pure starch,
a simple carbohydrate not much different than pure corn starch.
Plants construct starches from carbon dioxide gas obtained the
air and hydrogen obtained from water. There is no shortage ever
of carbon from CO2 in the air and rarely a shortage of hydrogen
from water. When the highly digestible starch in manioc is chewed,
digestive enzymes readily convert it into sugar. Nutritionally
there is virtually no difference between eating manioc and eating
white sugar. Both are entirely empty calories.

If you made a scale from ideal to worst
regarding the ratio of nutrition to calories, white sugar, manioc
and most fats are at the extreme undesirable end. Frankly I don't
know which single food might lie at the extreme positive end of
the scale. Close to perfect might be certain leafy green vegetables
that can be eaten raw. When they are grown on extremely fertile
soil, some greens develop 20 or more percent completely digestible
balanced protein with ideal ratios of all the essential amino
acids, lots of vitamins, tons of minerals, all sorts of enzymes
and other nutritional elementsand very few calories. You
could continually fill your stomach to bursting with raw leafy
greens and still have a hard time sustaining your body weight
if that was all you ate. Maybe Popeye the Sailorman was right
about eating spinach.

For the moment, lets ignore individual
genetic inabilities to digest specific foods and also ignore the
effects stress and enervation can have on our ability to extract
nutrition out of the food we are eating. Without those factors
to consider, it is correct to say that, to the extent one's diet
contains the maximum potential amount of nutrition relative to
the number of calories you are eating, to that extent a person
will be healthy. To the extent the diet is degraded from that
ideal, to that extent, disease will develop. Think about it!